Re: A "Why WebObjects" Site / Initial Thoughts Please (Modified by Bob McCormick)
Re: A "Why WebObjects" Site / Initial Thoughts Please (Modified by Bob McCormick)
- Subject: Re: A "Why WebObjects" Site / Initial Thoughts Please (Modified by Bob McCormick)
- From: Andrus Adamchik <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 16:34:05 -0400
Hi James,
Figured I'd add my $0.02...
Being at WWDC this year gave me a very good perspective why current WO
stagnation doesn't hurt Apple at all, and is OK from their business
viewpoint. Instead of trying to convert world to WO, Apple is doing the
opposite - bringing the world to Mac OS X by bundling every single
development tool known to man with the OS. At a risk of alienating a
few thousands WebObjects developers (this sucks, but then WO is not
going away, it is simply stagnating), Apple has a potential of bringing
hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of UNIX and Java geeks to the
Mac platform. And at a very little cost for that matter, as most of the
integrated tools are open source. I personally don't want to develop in
PHP, so I have my own objections, but it is hard to argue with such
business strategy - it makes sense.
Considering the above I think the energy spent on urging Apple to
change the course with WO, open source it, or market it, might as well
be directed in helping existing open source projects (or starting new
ones!) to bring the power of WO to the masses.
There is a lot of things that can be done - if you are not satisfied
with WOBuilder, help Ulrich with WOLips; if you need D2JC outside of
WO, help us bring it to Cayenne (we will do that anyway soon, but
things can move much faster); need a rule-based interface engine ala
D2W, lets start a new project integrating rules/Cayenne/Tapestry. And
finally, if you want all of the above to be on the MacOS X CD, try make
these things successful, and Apple will notice ;-).
A few more points...
Supporting existing open source projects as opposed to asking Apple to
open source WO has another advantage - these projects have a proven
survival record in the open source environment and have built a
substantial vibrant community. You can't create a community by
executive order.
Talking about grants, I think such (currently nonexistent) grants
should rather be spent to support WOProject/WOLips/objectstyle.org.
[What a self-serving idea, huh ;-)]. We could use a few bucks to cover
the hosting expenses, hire a part time sysadmin, get away from broken
SourceForge CVS, do some JUG presentations outside our home areas, etc.
This will be *much* less than 1 mln/yr. and would make a real
difference.
Cheers,
Andrus
------------------------------
Andrei (aka Andrus) Adamchik
Cayenne Object-Relational Framework
http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/
On Jul 10, 2004, at 9:19 PM, James Cicenia wrote:
Well it is nice to get back from my little vacation. I was actually
looking forward
to some positive news from the developers conference. I was especially
looking
forward to a WO 6.0 type announcement. Obviously, there was no WO 6.0
and
we all felt a bit slighted to say the least. I mean, can't Apple with
4 Billion in the
bank afford a small team of 5 individuals to work with Wonder, WOLips,
etc., to
make the product sing? It is hard for me to imagine the downside risk
here. A
million dollars a year is pocket change for Apple and the upside could
be a real
enterprise door opener. Ok, say 1 million is too much for Apple to
spend a year
on this fantastic product.... open source it then! This in-between
strategy is the
absolute worst strategy. It leads to stagnation, alienation, and no
enterprise
advantage to market. If Steve or someone at Apple could educate me as
to this
strategy's cost/benefit I would love to hear it.
Anyway, the real problem with WebObjects is marketing. I think this is
what we
agree on. Well, we could look upon this as an opportunity. If we all
took the
time to give some of our talent and resources, maybe we could create a
nice
WebObjects "associatoin". The charter would be to promote WebObjects.
Hey,
maybe even Apple could seed us a grant or two to help jump start our
campaigns.
The beautiful thing here is that our promotional efforts would also
generate clients.
Strictly off the top of my head I envision an association which is
responsible for
"open sourcing" frameworks, generating courseware and presentations,
mass
mailings to our core constituents with a monthly newsletter,
consolidated website and
monitoring of all geek sites and magazines. Strong communication with
Apple would
then become easier too. We could even maybe run ads. I did say that
Apple could
give us a grant or two. I would have to figure that if we did this for
one solid year we would make an impact.
I could go on, but then that would have to lead to a full blown
marketing plan. Well
that is my two cents on the matter after my nice vacation.
Good to be back,
James Cicenia
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